“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

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In which I doze off on a Love Sac

I think one of the most important developments of early adulthood is coming to know yourself well enough to know exactly what it is you want at a given moment, no matter how simple the desire is. There is something empowering and satisfying in saying, "I am an individual, with unique desires, and what I desire at this moment is to sit on a couch surrounded by friends who I love and watching a movie that I have already seen before (so that I can fall asleep in the middle of the movie without worrying that I'll miss the end). Also, it would be nice if this movie-watching/naptime could also involve me cuddling with a cute boy who I care a lot about." There is a freedom and a power in knowing your own desires, whether big or small, because once you know what you want, you are in a position to seek it out, to make it reality.

However, another important development that comes at this time of life is the understanding that you can't always get what you want. Even the most satisfying self-knowledge cannot change the fact that tonight, the friends I want to watch a movie with are all busy, in different states, or otherwise M.I.A., and if I'm being honest with myself, there will probably be no cuddling in my life any time in the near future. Along with the power and confidence of knowing my own desires comes the helplessness of knowing that wanting something isn't enough, that my will isn't the sole force in the universe. And the trickiest lesson of adulthood, one that I'm not sure I've learned fully, is that even when things don't work out how you want them to, they still work out. That even if you wanted nothing more than to fall asleep on a couch full of friends with "Beauty and the Beast" playing in the background, sometimes you instead get to blog, catch up on the news, and then go to bed wonderfully early, and that's okay too.

But there's one more important thing about life that I keep forgetting, and that is how often life can surprise you by giving you exactly what you want. That sometimes, even as you are in the middle of writing a blog post about how things don't always work out the way you'd like, you'll get a text that causes them to work out exactly that way. There wasn't any cuddling, but there was a movie, a projector, a Love Sac, and four of my best friends. And as I drifted off to sleep on my Love Sac, I smiled at how wonderfully surprising life can be.

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